Trepanned Russian soldiers, eagerly watching Vladimir Putin spin candy floss in the shape of brains to fill their skulls. Children gathered in the sandpit, wary of Russian soldiers about to drop a shell from the top of a slide. Most of the drawings published on two double pages by Charlie Hebdo, this Wednesday, May 25, speaks for itself. No speech bubbles, or very few, in these twenty works by Ukrainian artists that the satirical newspaper (25,000 weekly newsstand sales, around 37,000 subscribers) has chosen to highlight in a special issue. “A drawing without words, everyone can understand it, justifies Riss, the publication director. The message being purely visual, it is more “universalizable”. But Ukrainian cartoonists want to address the world. » In a situation of war, “excessive behavior becomes caricatural, and offers a boulevard to satirical drawings”he analyzes.
“The only target is the aggressor”
Antonio Fischetti went to look for them on the spot, during a report which seemed to start with a failure. “Initially, I had heard about comedians doing stand-up and sketches on the Internetsays the scientific journalist. But one of my interlocutors had seen a drawing by Riss inspired by the bombing of the Mariupol maternity hospital. [on y voit une rangée de femmes, jambes en l’air, des obus russes dans le vagin]. He found it outrageous, not humorous, even contemptuous – as it aimed to denounce the inaction of Westerners. He passed the message to all his friends in kyiv, and I had to find something else. »
Apart from Kusto, cartoonist for the newspaper of the Ukrainian Parliament, it was in Odessa that Antonio Fischetti found the authors and works he was looking for; collected on the occasion of an exhibition launched on the initiative of a club of caricaturists, these will be sold for the benefit of the Ukrainian army and the territorial defense of the port city. “I encountered a popular culture of resistance, important for moralecontinues the journalist. Before the war, traditional humor was rather benevolent. Today, it has become more ferocious, more trashy. The only target is the aggressor. » The sufferings of the war, the daily human losses and the ongoing destruction prevent any dark humor vis-à-vis Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians themselves, he notes.
For Riss, the publication of these vignettes in the newspaper which, on January 7, 2015, saw 12 lives stolen and 11 ravaged in an Islamist terrorist attack, was obviously self-evident.. “When one is confronted with arbitrariness, drawing is a means of protecting one’s territory of freedom. »